[anonymousab]

They aren't really fighting it, because they never picked a winnable battle.

Rather, they overextended themselves massively in a blunder akin to just throwing themselves on their enemy's sword. They decided to go all-or-nothing on uncontrolled digital lending when there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that the current laws would give them any wiggle room. And unsurprisingly, it will give them a mortal wound.

[mrguyorama]

"Pick a winnable fight" means the internet archive does not exist. Copyright in the US is very clear cut. There is no fight to "win" without changing the law.

That means advocacy. That sometimes means civil disobedience and getting society to fight for them. You want an internet archive? We need to reform copyright law.

[lolinder]

The Internet Archive already pushed the boundaries and existed for long enough to make meaningful headway. They were winning the fight by picking the right battles and flying under the radar all the way up until they decided to completely overstep their mission and take on a fight that no one had any hope they would win.

[renewiltord]

Yeah, but no person who would worry about this would have made the IA in the first place. IA itself is a massive copyright suit waiting to happen.

I know, I know, if you were them and had bought bitcoin at $10 you would have sold at precisely the top at $70k per and neither before nor after.

[anonymousab]

I would agree, but IA did eventually add a mechanism for removing a site/copyrighted content entirely.

If they were straight up ignoring or rejecting DMCA takedown requests, then that would be a self-immolation that is similarly pyrrhic to the uncontrolled digital lending operation.

[Apocryphon]

[flagged]

[renewiltord]

Sure, but the guy who would conceive and execute on this idea was never going to be a guy who would stop there.

Folks like this don’t aim at some point and then achieve it and stay there. They aim higher, land where they do, and continue to target the higher point. It’s how it is.

You can tell because how many of the rest of the people who would have stopped and flown under the radar have duplicated the Archive and served it without the taint of the ebook lending? Precisely zero.

[Apocryphon]

Hm, what's that Carl Sagan quote, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Brewster Kahle's vision for the Internet Archive as an electronic repository for human knowledge is the former. His belief that he can just blithely tussle with the entire copyright regime in such a half-cocked manner is the latter. You should not confuse folly for audacity. Especially when it might completely jeopardize the former.

[renewiltord]

I'll believe it when the pragmatic someone will replicate the Archive in all but ebook lending. Exactly zero of these wise men have done anything which is what I expect from those who speak who never do.

[Apocryphon]

Slavish "the man in the arena" worship isn't particularly audacious. Unquestioning support for audacity for the sake of it speaks to lack of discernment. And to parrot a HN truism- a failure to account for survivor bias.

By all means, romanticize recklessness even when it results in self-defeating catastrophe. Yet there are plenty of other worthier figures to lionize and archives to patronize- Alexandra Elbakyan and Sci-Hub, the anonymous samizdat dissidents and LibGen.